3 ms·

It's not a terrible idea, it's a bad metaphor from imperfect people trying to explain a perfectly fine idea. STAR voting is NOT like rating books on Amazon, it

It's not a terrible idea, it's a bad metaphor from imperfect people trying to explain a perfectly fine idea. STAR voting is NOT like rating books on Amazon, it's just superficially similar. At Amazon, if you don't like any of a bunch of books, none of them get 5 stars. With STAR voting, you award points not to mean anything, but only to decide how much ahead in the race you want to push each candidate versus the others. Whoever you want to win most, you push them ahead with all 5 available points. That's it. Your reaction and misunderstanding does further my annoyance at the people explaining STAR using the Amazon analogy, and I think that bad comparison is harming support for what is truly an excellent voting system.

iainmerrick 8y ago
I’ll admit I didn’t read much further than that, yeah. It’s possible it’s a good system and I’m just put off by the unfortunate comparison. My issue with all of these point- and range-based voting systems is that when you see the results, you might want to tweak your scores. Let’s say I’m range voting out of 10 and I give four candidates 1, 3, 8 and 10 points respectively. But the candidate I rated 3 wins, with the candidate I rated 8 a close second. Damn it! If I’d known that was going to happen, I would have voted 1, 1, 10, 10. So with extra information, range voting boils down to approval voting, and I think it all ultimately becomes ranked voting. It’s hard to imagine any scenario where I would want to change my rankings, even if I have information about the results. If I like both candidates A and B, but A slightly more, I’ll always put them at the top of my list and in that order. Now, it’s true that in IRV there are scenarios where I can get a better result for myself by voting for candidate ranks in a different order; but those are rare (I think) and definitely unintuitive. In the example above, if B were a real long shot candidate, it might be worth ranking them above A in case B gets eliminated early. But it’s unlikely to make a big difference because, you know, B is a long shot. And that’s just IRV; other ranked voting systems are much more robust.
- quadrangle 8y ago
  > Let’s say I’m range voting out of 10 and I give four candidates 1, 3, 8 and 10 points respectively. But the candidate I rated 3 wins, with the candidate I rated 8 a close second. Damn it! If I’d known that was going to happen, I would have voted 1, 1, 10, 10. This is the EXACT reason STAR voting was invented. Unlike plain score, STAR has a runoff where it compares your preference of the top two and puts your full vote to your preference. So, this is like an exact case study of why STAR is worthwhile. STAR proposes 0-5, but we can stick with 1-10 for this case. You vote 1, 3, 8, 10 and the top two candidates are the ones you voted 3 and 8. With STAR, it doesn't matter that your 3 candidate got a total score higher than your 8 candidate, your vote in the runoff goes to your 8 because that's rated higher. If more voters rated that candidate higher, they win even if their plain score total was lower. Thus, you don't have to exaggerate all your scores. In fact, you have an incentive not to, because if you just give ties, you risk abstaining in the runoff instead of having a say there. I mean literally you just spelled out the most common critique of plain score voting which is itself THE argument for why we should use STAR instead.
  - iainmerrick 8y ago
    It sounds like STAR is equivalent (or at least similar) to the Condorcet-with-score-based tiebreaker that somebody proposed elsewhere (edit to add: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18395358 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18395358 ) in this thread. I understood that one but not STAR. It needs much better explanation and marketing! Edit: doh, wait, STAR is in fact the exact opposite -- scores first, ranks as a tiebreaker. I’m reading https://www.equal.vote/starvoting https://www.equal.vote/starvoting and I still don’t entirely follow. It’s lacking some detail I’d like to understand. For example, it looks like it is not a Condorcet method. That seems bad to me -- if you’re not electing the Condorcet winner, you need a very good explanation why; and I don’t trust an appeal to numerical ratings that each voter will interpret and use in different ways. Aha, yes, Wikipedia has a clearer explanation and confirms that it is not Condorcet: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting I do agree that it looks probably better than IRV, but I’m not yet convinced that it’s a really good system and is worth pushing as a good approach for real elections.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - quadrangle 8y ago
      Thanks for being open-minded. I mentioned in my other reply (to your other reply) why Condorcet isn't strictly ideal. Discussing the edge-cases where STAR does not support the Condorcet candidate is too long a discussion, I can't get into it here. One short point: the primary problem with not electing Condorcet is that coordinated strategic majority could, in hindsight and for future elections, force the Condorcet by refusing to support later preferences. In STAR, that strategy is risky and unpredictable. If the Condorcet is a strong case, it will win STAR anyway. If it's an edge case, nobody knows in advance if it will be the true majority or just a bit less, so strategically zeroing all by the favorite is so risky in that edge case, most people won't do it (it could backfire for them to refuse to support their 2nd favorites if their hail-mary hope that they just might have a Condorcet turns out to be wrong). No strategies with STAR are reliable. The best outcomes come from just being honest. Note: STAR doesn't use rank as a tie-breaker only. It can flat-out overrule a score difference with the 2nd-highest scoring candidate winning. It's not just for ties. > I do agree that it looks probably better than IRV, but I’m not yet convinced that it’s a really good system Well, since IRV gets pushed for real elections and STAR is better on a large number of factors, and both are better than FPTP… You otherwise want to promote 3-2-1 https://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/3-2-1_voting https://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/3-2-1_voting or approval or maybe some good PR approach like PLACE voting https://medium.com/@jameson.quinn/place-voting-the-elevator-pitch-abbdbeb08ecf https://medium.com/@jameson.quinn/place-voting-the-elevator-... If you want to discuss this stuff more with other folks, https://forum.electionscience.org https://forum.electionscience.org is the place to go, btw
solipsism 8y ago
What is this "push ahead" crap? I have no idea how that's different from the Amazon analogy. You should come to terms with the fact that whatever you mean is completely unintuitive to many/most of us, and that almost everyone will just this like they use Amazon. Whether or not the page says "it's like Amazon" or "it's not like Amazon".
- quadrangle 8y ago
  Calling something crap doesn't encourage constructive discourse if you're looking to actually gain something from a discussion. But I can ignore that. The ballots are proposed as labeled "no support" to "most support". It isn't entirely unlike Amazon, it's like Amazon if your standard for what's a 5, like "the best book" is "the best of THESE candidates". All people need to do to get the system is care about their impact on the outcome of the election in order to realize that 5 doesn't mean "love" or some other semantic thing, it just means the top of the options. And if people just use it like Amazon and some give no candidate a 5, the system doesn't fall apart, it works pretty well anyway.
  - iainmerrick 8y ago
    Is there evidence from real world trials that everyday voters do use STAR correctly? How many people use the full 1-5 (0-5?) range in their ballots?
    - quadrangle 8y ago
      STAR has never been used in a public election. At some point, we can't both argue about lack of evidence and against getting the evidence. http://star.vote http://star.vote is not a controlled scientific survey or anything, but people overall seem to have no trouble using the full range. In fact, in my anecdotal experience, even over years in the past when I told people about plain score voting and tried to get them not to use the full range (because I misunderstood that issue myself), many people insisted that they would use the full range anyway. A lot of people find it intuitive to give their favorite all the points they can. But the real answer is that, yes, we need more studies and trials of all these things.

iainmerrick 8y ago

I’ll admit I didn’t read much further than that, yeah. It’s possible it’s a good system and I’m just put off by the unfortunate comparison. My issue with all of these point- and range-based voting systems is that when you see the results, you might want to tweak your scores. Let’s say I’m range voting out of 10 and I give four candidates 1, 3, 8 and 10 points respectively. But the candidate I rated 3 wins, with the candidate I rated 8 a close second. Damn it! If I’d known that was going to happen, I would have voted 1, 1, 10, 10. So with extra information, range voting boils down to approval voting, and I think it all ultimately becomes ranked voting. It’s hard to imagine any scenario where I would want to change my rankings, even if I have information about the results. If I like both candidates A and B, but A slightly more, I’ll always put them at the top of my list and in that order. Now, it’s true that in IRV there are scenarios where I can get a better result for myself by voting for candidate ranks in a different order; but those are rare (I think) and definitely unintuitive. In the example above, if B were a real long shot candidate, it might be worth ranking them above A in case B gets eliminated early. But it’s unlikely to make a big difference because, you know, B is a long shot. And that’s just IRV; other ranked voting systems are much more robust.

quadrangle 8y ago
> Let’s say I’m range voting out of 10 and I give four candidates 1, 3, 8 and 10 points respectively. But the candidate I rated 3 wins, with the candidate I rated 8 a close second. Damn it! If I’d known that was going to happen, I would have voted 1, 1, 10, 10. This is the EXACT reason STAR voting was invented. Unlike plain score, STAR has a runoff where it compares your preference of the top two and puts your full vote to your preference. So, this is like an exact case study of why STAR is worthwhile. STAR proposes 0-5, but we can stick with 1-10 for this case. You vote 1, 3, 8, 10 and the top two candidates are the ones you voted 3 and 8. With STAR, it doesn't matter that your 3 candidate got a total score higher than your 8 candidate, your vote in the runoff goes to your 8 because that's rated higher. If more voters rated that candidate higher, they win even if their plain score total was lower. Thus, you don't have to exaggerate all your scores. In fact, you have an incentive not to, because if you just give ties, you risk abstaining in the runoff instead of having a say there. I mean literally you just spelled out the most common critique of plain score voting which is itself THE argument for why we should use STAR instead.
- iainmerrick 8y ago
  It sounds like STAR is equivalent (or at least similar) to the Condorcet-with-score-based tiebreaker that somebody proposed elsewhere (edit to add: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18395358 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18395358 ) in this thread. I understood that one but not STAR. It needs much better explanation and marketing! Edit: doh, wait, STAR is in fact the exact opposite -- scores first, ranks as a tiebreaker. I’m reading https://www.equal.vote/starvoting https://www.equal.vote/starvoting and I still don’t entirely follow. It’s lacking some detail I’d like to understand. For example, it looks like it is not a Condorcet method. That seems bad to me -- if you’re not electing the Condorcet winner, you need a very good explanation why; and I don’t trust an appeal to numerical ratings that each voter will interpret and use in different ways. Aha, yes, Wikipedia has a clearer explanation and confirms that it is not Condorcet: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting I do agree that it looks probably better than IRV, but I’m not yet convinced that it’s a really good system and is worth pushing as a good approach for real elections.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - quadrangle 8y ago
    Thanks for being open-minded. I mentioned in my other reply (to your other reply) why Condorcet isn't strictly ideal. Discussing the edge-cases where STAR does not support the Condorcet candidate is too long a discussion, I can't get into it here. One short point: the primary problem with not electing Condorcet is that coordinated strategic majority could, in hindsight and for future elections, force the Condorcet by refusing to support later preferences. In STAR, that strategy is risky and unpredictable. If the Condorcet is a strong case, it will win STAR anyway. If it's an edge case, nobody knows in advance if it will be the true majority or just a bit less, so strategically zeroing all by the favorite is so risky in that edge case, most people won't do it (it could backfire for them to refuse to support their 2nd favorites if their hail-mary hope that they just might have a Condorcet turns out to be wrong). No strategies with STAR are reliable. The best outcomes come from just being honest. Note: STAR doesn't use rank as a tie-breaker only. It can flat-out overrule a score difference with the 2nd-highest scoring candidate winning. It's not just for ties. > I do agree that it looks probably better than IRV, but I’m not yet convinced that it’s a really good system Well, since IRV gets pushed for real elections and STAR is better on a large number of factors, and both are better than FPTP… You otherwise want to promote 3-2-1 https://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/3-2-1_voting https://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/3-2-1_voting or approval or maybe some good PR approach like PLACE voting https://medium.com/@jameson.quinn/place-voting-the-elevator-pitch-abbdbeb08ecf https://medium.com/@jameson.quinn/place-voting-the-elevator-... If you want to discuss this stuff more with other folks, https://forum.electionscience.org https://forum.electionscience.org is the place to go, btw

solipsism 8y ago

What is this "push ahead" crap? I have no idea how that's different from the Amazon analogy. You should come to terms with the fact that whatever you mean is completely unintuitive to many/most of us, and that almost everyone will just this like they use Amazon. Whether or not the page says "it's like Amazon" or "it's not like Amazon".

quadrangle 8y ago
Calling something crap doesn't encourage constructive discourse if you're looking to actually gain something from a discussion. But I can ignore that. The ballots are proposed as labeled "no support" to "most support". It isn't entirely unlike Amazon, it's like Amazon if your standard for what's a 5, like "the best book" is "the best of THESE candidates". All people need to do to get the system is care about their impact on the outcome of the election in order to realize that 5 doesn't mean "love" or some other semantic thing, it just means the top of the options. And if people just use it like Amazon and some give no candidate a 5, the system doesn't fall apart, it works pretty well anyway.
- iainmerrick 8y ago
  Is there evidence from real world trials that everyday voters do use STAR correctly? How many people use the full 1-5 (0-5?) range in their ballots?
  - quadrangle 8y ago
    STAR has never been used in a public election. At some point, we can't both argue about lack of evidence and against getting the evidence. http://star.vote http://star.vote is not a controlled scientific survey or anything, but people overall seem to have no trouble using the full range. In fact, in my anecdotal experience, even over years in the past when I told people about plain score voting and tried to get them not to use the full range (because I misunderstood that issue myself), many people insisted that they would use the full range anyway. A lot of people find it intuitive to give their favorite all the points they can. But the real answer is that, yes, we need more studies and trials of all these things.